Quercus (PHP implementation in Java) is faster than the C version

July 21, 2006 in Architecture by jc | No comments

Interesting piece of information from this post on PushToTest :

Caucho told developers that they are seeing an astonishing 4 to 6 times performance improvement over the C-version of PHP. Quercus runs with JVM thread safety – something not available to PHP developers today – to enable things like database connection pooling in a threaded environment. Quercus is expected to ship by December 2006.

Here is another mention of this information on ServerSide :

Apparently, the PHP pages are compiled in the background to byte-code, and the resulting performance is six times that of Apache mod_php!

And this post is generating quite a few comments.

A more definitive source of information is available on the caucho forum where some actual numbers have been posted :

Test Name Resin/Quercus Apache 2.0/PHP 5.0
file_1k 6341 ops 3255 ops
file_1k (10 clients, 16 keepalive) 13186 ops 6154 ops
file_64k 857 ops 841 ops
file_64k (10 clients, 16 keepalive) 1019 ops 995 ops

file_7m 10.7 ops 11.8 ops
jsp_1k 7070 ops n/a
gzip_1k 2570 ops n/a
gzip_1k (cache ) 6529 ops n/a
gzip_64k 343 ops n/a
gzip_64k (cache) 6220 ops n/a
ssl_1k 173 ops n/a
ssl_1k (10 clients, 16 keepalive) 1795 ops n/a
ssl_64k 85 ops n/a
ssl_64k (10 clients, 16 keepalive> 155 ops n/a
php_1k 4194 ops 1151 ops
php_1k (10 clients, 16 keepalive) 7806 ops 1508 ops
mediawiki 17 ops 5 ops
mediawiki (10 clients, 16 keepalive) 17 ops 5 ops
mediawiki (proxy cache) 3546 ops 5 ops
drupal 33 ops 10 ops
drupal (10 clients, 16 keepalive) 30 ops 10 ops

and, with PHP acceleration :

Test Resin/Quercus Apache/PHP/eaccelerator

drupal 46 ops 43 ops

wiki 30 ops 17 ops

With more tuning, the PHP performance might match the Resin/Quercus ones, but it should be a wake up call to all the Java detractors. Java IS NOT SLOW !